MARK Carney is not the person you would expect to deliver the message from within the Global North that their conspiracy to rule the world has ended. The Global North, the Collective West, whatever you want to call it, had formed into a decisive military and political bloc after World War II, which effectively ended the divisions within the Global North and gradually brought all its pieces into a line with the United States at its head. Things had been different from the old world, where rivals (such as Britain and France, and then France and Germany, and then Germany against everyone) fought it out endlessly over matters of land and god, and then over overseas possessions. World War II exhausted these wars within Europe, and left the western side of the continent and Japan as effectively near colonies of the United States (US bases in the occupied lands of Germany, Italy, and Japan remain to this day, and there are US bases in most of the western European countries either from the 1944-45 period or from the immediate aftermath). The western European countries hastened to join the US military bloc, NATO, in 1949, and then with the US Marshall Plan funds converted their economies into consumers of the massive US industrial production machine. There was no country amongst the main defeated powers of the war (Germany, Italy, and Japan) and amongst the old settler colonies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, southern Africa, and the United Kingdom) that did not bow down before the leadership of the United States from that period onward.

The close collaboration between these powers strengthened during the inter-capitalist conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s as stagnation and inflation wracked their economies and as the defeated powers (especially Germany and Japan) began to outdo the US in the production of technological goods. With the formation of the G-7 in 1974, these powers (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and the US) with their associated allies (the other Western European countries and Australia and New Zealand) formed not only a military alliance (NATO+) but also now an economic, political, and security alliance (the G7 and the Five Eyes intelligence network). Despite all the stresses and strains within this alliance – which comprises the Global North – it held together. When there were trade problems, the US forced Japan and to the Europeans to revalue their currency with the dollar to advantage the US, and the US maintained the petro-dollar and Euro-dollar markets as well as drew in investment from the capitalist class across the Global North into its bond markets and into its stock market.

This integration of the Global North’s dominant classes did not create a kind of ‘ultra-imperialism’ – as Karl Kautsky had forecast – but it did strengthen a unity against threats that they understood to be common, such as against the Soviet Union (until 1991), the ‘rogue’ states (such as Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and later Venezuela), and a range of non-state actors that had nothing in common (Hezbollah and the Communists) but were seen by Washington as being hindrances to the establishment of the ‘New American Century’. It is this unity – a ‘pleasant fiction’ – that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney indicated has been broken, and where the United States ‘is submitted to no limits, no constraints’.

CARNEY’S ‘RUPTURE’

In fact, Carney’s statement is itself in error. Canada and its other settler colonial countries had for decades been willing allies in a ‘no limits, no constraints’ domination of the Global South. It was when Mark Carney was the head of the Bank of England in 2018 that the US asked the British government, and Carney, to deny the Venezuelan government access to 31 tonnes of Venezuelan gold (estimated to be valued at $4.8 billion today). At that time, Carney went along with the ‘pleasant fiction’ that the US was right to discard the legitimacy of President Nicolás Maduro and that they were correct to anoint Juan Guaidó, an insignificant political figure, as the actual president. It was Canada’s Peter Munk (head of Barrick Gold now Barrick Mining) who openly called for the overthrow of the Bolivarian Revolution because it blocked his company’s access to remove Venezuelan gold from under the ground at a cost that gave all the advantage to this Canadian mining giant. These tentacles that emerged from Washington and took root in Ottawa went further: in 2017, it was the government in Canada that formed the Lima Group of Western Hemisphere countries to pledge to break diplomatic ties with Venezuela and to assist in regime change (it has been much quieter after 2020).

Carney did not directly mention any of these details, but he did say that all the Western leaders knew that ‘the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically’. They knew all this, he says, and they accepted it because it was worth their while. ‘American hegemony’, he said, ‘was useful’. ‘We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality’. In other words, the leaders of the Collective West knew that the US was not actually following international law, but as long as they collectively benefitted from this asymmetry, they accepted it. Carney did not say that Canada was upset by any break from principle. When he said, ‘We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,’ he made the point to indicate that this was because the ‘bargain no longer works’. Trump and the US ruling class had turned their eyes on Greenland (owned one way or another by Denmark) and on Canada, impacting the fortunes of two NATO members; after the illegal kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, Chile’s President Gabriel Boric, no fan of Maduro, condemned the kidnapping and said, ‘today Venezuela, tomorrow anyone’. He was speaking to Latin America, which has experienced this kind of behaviour from the US before with the coups and the invasions. But for Carney, the turn of the US toward the Collective West was far too much. That was the reason for the rupture.

Before he came to Davos, Carney went to China, where he signed a range of trade agreements. The US has no investment to generate for its own net fixed capital investment let alone investments that it can export to countries such as Canada. The US, therefore, can no longer invest in the development of these countries, and in fact, covets the resources and land of these countries. China, on the other hand, which the US sees as its main challenge in the world, has immense surpluses to invest. This was equally the story in Greenland. Trump’s reaction to the question of Greenland was not about Chinese military bases (which do not exist and are not being planned) but about Chinese investments. The immense contradiction (US military power without US economic hegemony) is what generates the hyper-imperialism of our time. The US uses its military dominance to threaten and bully countries into submission. Trump’s statement at Davos was emblematic and worth reading in full:

Two weeks ago, they saw weapons that nobody ever heard of. They weren't able to fire one shot at us. They said, ‘What happened?’ Everything was discombobulated. They said, ‘We’ve got them in our sights. Press the trigger’. And nothing happened. No anti-aircraft missiles went up. There was one that went up about 30 feet and crashed down, right next to the people that sent it. They said, ‘What the hell is going on those?’ Those defensive systems were made by Russia and by China. So, they’re going to go back to the drawing boards, I guess.

That last idea is the key one: Russia and China, Trump said, cannot defend themselves if their own systems failed in Venezuela. The US told Delcy Rodriquez right after they kidnapped Maduro that she had 15 minutes to comply with their orders, or Caracas would be turned into Gaza. Gaza is the example for the countries of the world of current US military capabilities, and Venezuela is the example of what they can do and what kind of restraint they can manage if they get their way. For Carney and for the Europeans as well as the Japanese, there is no problem with Gaza or with Venezuela. Their problem is with Greenland. The rupture that he has been celebrated for mentioning is a rupture within the Collective West not a rupture between the politics of international law (based on the UN Charter) and the politics of naked imperialism (experienced with the US as the head since 1945 with this global footprint).

There is a rupture within the G-7 states, and it is a rupture worth exploiting to make room for other countries to exercise their sovereignty. But it is not a rupture of the Europeans from the agenda of hyper-imperialism. They can tolerate that as long as the pistols are not pointed at them.